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Ig Nobels special and Darwin Now competition

FEEDBACK’S favourite prizes, the Ig Nobels, were handed out on 1 October at Harvard University in a ceremony organised by the Annals of Improbable Research. After a year of global financial turmoil, the theme was risk, expounded in a 1-minute keynote address by Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician who years ago showed that financial markets are fraught with wild fluctuations. A poorer but wiser Feedback wishes we had listened the first time.

After a year filled with a flock of financial achievements any one of which might merit an Ig Nobel, the economics prize was …